Howard Jacobson - J

‘You don’t know that. I was also frightened about you. I didn’t like to see you like that.’

‘Do you want me to explain?’

‘No.’ She meant no, not now, but it came out more final than that.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘So am I.’

He couldn’t bear leaving right away as she proposed. The thought of driving home in this hostile silence appalled him. You don’t leave anywhere like that: it would feel too irresistibly as though they were leaving each other. Better to sit tight, with throbbing temples, and wait for the mood to change. How many marriages might have been saved if only the parties to it had waited — days, weeks, months, it didn’t matter — for the mood to change?

‘Let’s get your phone fixed and then go,’ he said.

He wanted to be back where they were before the swearing. And he was anxious to show her that her concerns were foremost in his mind. It was concern for her after all, his desperation to get her back to the hotel so she could sleep off her migraine, that made him fight for the taxi. Unless it was the responsibility he felt for her that had unhinged him. Was he not up to the job of looking after a woman? Did fear of failure unman him?

‘I don’t care about my phone,’ she said.

‘But I do. And I’d like an errand to clear my head.’

‘To clear your head!’

‘To clear both our heads.’

‘So how do you propose we do this? Go outside and hail a taxi?’

So the punch came, whoever delivered it. But he still refused to capitulate to what it could have meant had he let it.

‘I’ll get the hotel to call us one,’ he said.

He said it firmly. He was not going to allow looking after a woman to emasculate him.

v

It took an hour for a taxi to arrive but when it did the driver swung out of his cab to greet them, bowed low, introduced himself as Ranajay Margolis, looked up at the rain and produced an umbrella as a magician might produce a wand. He insisted on opening the passenger doors for them, one at a time, Ailinn’s first.

Struck by his manners, Kevern asked where he was from originally.

Ailinn dug him. He had lived too long in Port Reuben where a black or Asian face was seldom seen. No one had entered the country from anywhere else for a long time. Every person’s country of origin — regardless of whether they were a Margolis or a Gutkind — was this one. Wasn’t that what made now so much better than then?

Kevern didn’t mind the dig. So long as she was digging him they were together.

Ranajay Margolis was amused. He almost danced himself back into his seat. ‘I am from here,’ he said. ‘As for originally that depends how far back you want me to go. Where are you from originally ?’

Kevern held up a hand. He took the point.

Ailinn explained that they wanted to get her phone fixed.

‘I’m just the man,’ the driver said in his quicksilver manner, turning round frequently and flashing them his snowy teeth, ‘but first I’ll give you a tour.’

‘We don’t want a tour, thank you,’ she said. ‘Just my phone fixed.’

‘There are special places for that,’ the driver said. ‘I know them all. But they aren’t easy to find and some of them aren’t very trustworthy.’

‘We know, that’s why we’re asking you to take us.’

He bowed as he was driving. ‘You sure you don’t want a tour?’

‘Certain.’

‘In that case,’ he said, raising a finger like an exclamation mark, as though to punctuate a great idea that had just come to him, ‘we will have to go to where the Cohens lived.’

‘The Cohens! I’m a Cohen,’ Kevern said. He felt a burst of excitement as he said it. Ranajay Margolis had asked him where he was from originally. What if he was from here? Would he encounter people who looked like him on the streets? Uncles, nieces, cousins? Would they be sitting on benches — so many tall, angel-haired ‘Cocos’ with long faces — minding their language and wondering what their lives amounted to?

Ranajay studied his reflection in the driver’s mirror. ‘No,’ he explained, ‘I mean real Cohens.’

Kevern offered to show him his ID.

Ranajay shook his head. ‘That changes nothing,’ he said.

They drove north for about half an hour, along tense, surly streets, past stores selling Turkish vegetables, and then stores selling Indian vegetables, and then stores selling Caribbean vegetables, until they came to a suburb of houses built in a bygone, faraway style, Greek temples, Elizabethan mansions, woodland cottages, Swiss chalets, Malibu country clubs. No film set could have suggested lavish living with so little subtlety. But whatever their original ostentation, the mansions housed more modest domestic ambitions now. Indian children played on the street or stared out at the taxi through upper-storey windows. A handful of men in open-necked shirts played cards under a portico that might once have sheltered foreign dignitaries and maybe even royalty as they drank cocktails. Perhaps because no one could afford their upkeep, some of the grandest dwellings had fallen into disuse. Colonnades crumbled. Corinthian columns that must once have glowed with the phosphorescence of fantasy were dull in the drizzle, in need of replastering and paint. Yet this was no slum. Those houses that were inhabited looked cared for, the neat gardens and net curtains, the atmosphere of quiet industry — even the card-playing was businesslike — mocking the grandeur of those who’d originally occupied them. Many of the garages, large enough to take a fleet of Hollywood limousines — one for him, one for her, and something only marginally smaller for Junior — served as electrical or mechanics workshops and even retail outlets, though it was hard to imagine any passing trade. Signs promised prompt and efficient repairs to utility phones and consoles. Black-eyed adolescent boys sat cross-legged on walls, engrossed in their electronic toys, as though to advertise the competence of their parents’ businesses.

The Cohens had lived here, Ranajay had said. What did he mean? Had it been a Cohen colony? Cohentown? He was adamant, anyway, that no Cohens lived here now, and that Kevern’s family never had. But who was he to say that? How did he know?

Kevern’s parents would never tell him where they had come from. It didn’t matter, they’d said. It wasn’t important. Don’t ask. The question itself depressed and enraged them. Maybe it reminded them of their sin in marrying. But his father had warned him off the Necropolis. ‘Don’t go there,’ he had said, ‘it will dismay and disappoint you.’ But he hadn’t said ‘Don’t go to Cohentown , it will disappoint you.’ Just don’t go anywhere. Just stay in Port Reuben which — he might have added — will also disappoint you.

He didn’t see how he could be disappointed when he had no expectations. But he had been excited when Ranajay had said Cohens had lived here. So there must have been some expectation in him somewhere, some anticipation, at least, that he had known nothing about.

Cohentown — why not?

What do I feel, he asked himself, thinking he should feel more.

What he felt was oppressed, as though there was thunder about.

He asked to be let out of the cab so he could smell the air. ‘There’s no air to smell,’ Ranajay Margolis said. ‘Just cooking.’

‘Cooking’s fine.’

Ranajay was insistent. ‘Come. I will take you to the best place to have your phone fixed. I can get you a good deal.’

‘Just give me a minute. I want to see if anything comes back to me.’

‘You were never here,’ Ranajay insisted. ‘It’s not possible.’

‘I think that’s for me to decide,’ Kevern said.